One if by Land, Two if by Sea, Three if by Four Seas, and More to Come -- Values of Perception, Prediction, Communication, and Common Sense in Decision Making

Fuente: arXiv
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1. Verfasser: Xu, Aolin
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Xu, Aolin
author_facet Xu, Aolin
contents This work aims to rigorously define the values of perception, prediction, communication, and common sense in decision making. The defined quantities are decision-theoretic, but have information-theoretic analogues, e.g., they share some simple but key mathematical properties with Shannon entropy and mutual information, and can reduce to these quantities in particular settings. One interesting observation is that, the value of perception without prediction can be negative, while the value of perception together with prediction and the value of prediction alone are always nonnegative. The defined quantities suggest answers to practical questions arising in the design of autonomous decision-making systems. Example questions include: Do we need to observe and predict the behavior of a particular agent? How important is it? What is the best order to observe and predict the agents? The defined quantities may also provide insights to cognitive science and neural science, toward the understanding of how natural decision makers make use of information gained from different sources and operations.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_06077
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle One if by Land, Two if by Sea, Three if by Four Seas, and More to Come -- Values of Perception, Prediction, Communication, and Common Sense in Decision Making
Xu, Aolin
Information Theory
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Optimization and Control
This work aims to rigorously define the values of perception, prediction, communication, and common sense in decision making. The defined quantities are decision-theoretic, but have information-theoretic analogues, e.g., they share some simple but key mathematical properties with Shannon entropy and mutual information, and can reduce to these quantities in particular settings. One interesting observation is that, the value of perception without prediction can be negative, while the value of perception together with prediction and the value of prediction alone are always nonnegative. The defined quantities suggest answers to practical questions arising in the design of autonomous decision-making systems. Example questions include: Do we need to observe and predict the behavior of a particular agent? How important is it? What is the best order to observe and predict the agents? The defined quantities may also provide insights to cognitive science and neural science, toward the understanding of how natural decision makers make use of information gained from different sources and operations.
title One if by Land, Two if by Sea, Three if by Four Seas, and More to Come -- Values of Perception, Prediction, Communication, and Common Sense in Decision Making
topic Information Theory
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Optimization and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.06077